Pursuing greatness while staying simple: challenges for today's leaders

How we live and work together is undergoing profound shifts. Our times call for great leaders with a vision infused with hope, trust and daring. Leaders who fulfil their mission with dedication and can challenge themselves and those around them.

Personal leadership to reach others

People are driven by needs and values. As a leader, it’s in your interest to lead your life in line with your values and to involve others in this. Nonviolent Communication supports you in staying connected with yourself and others, and in developing a language that gives hands and feet to your vision and mission. Steven Covey put it this way:

“An organisational mission statement that truly reflects the deeply shared vision and values of everyone within that organisation creates great unity and tremendous commitment. It creates in people’s hearts and minds a frame of reference, a set of criteria or guidelines, by which they will govern themselves. They don’t need someone else directing, controlling, criticising, or taking cheap shots. They have bought into the changeless core of what the organisation is about.”

Simplicity to make room for others

Simplicity is also about the habit of living truthfully about yourself, with all your virtues and flaws. It forms the foundation that serves connection with others. Recognising your own strengths and weaknesses becomes the standard you pass on to others, creating space for genuine engagement.

Leaders set high standards for performance, for themselves and for others. The results they achieve come through encouragement, not through threat. Leadership is therefore less about exercising power and more about empowering others by:

• Asking everyone in the organisation for their contributions to problem-solving, recognising those contributions and putting them to use.
• Not intervening in employees’ tasks without good reason.
• Not doing the work of employees.
• Delegating decision-making authority and making others co-responsible for results.
• Taking responsibility for results, both the good and the less good.

In our three-day expert training Connecting Leadership, we offer a container for getting to know yourself better, making your vision explicit and involving others in it.